World

Twitter Was Watched for Security Threats During Obama's Inauguration

The Presidential Inauguration Committee worked with Twitter monitoring firm Dataminr to detect potential security threats during President Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony last week, Mashable has learned.

Dataminr's team discovered one such potential problem — an entrance gate that was unexpectedly closed — and notified the Presidential Inauguration Committee ten minutes before it got word of the situation from more conventional means.

"They were able to use that warning to actually take action and preempt the situation before it escalated," said Dataminr CEO Ted Bailey in an interview with Mashable. "The situation was there was a sudden gate closure and there was the start of a Twitter reaction to it, and although I don't know the specific details of how they changed that situation, what they have confirmed to me is that they used this warning to actually effect change on the situation and mitigate risk."

Dataminr, which has access to Twitter's firehose, monitors Twitter activity in a pre-determined geographic area — in the case of the inauguration, that was the National Mall, the parade route and other parts of Washington, D.C.

Dataminr gets some location data from geotagged tweets, but it also looks for contextual clues such as keywords ("National Mall") or Foursquare check-ins. Location aside, Dataminr does not rely on pre-selected content parameters, instead adapting to situations as they develop.

"The key to our event detection technology, which is a very unique approach to looking at the [Twitter] firehose, is that one doesn't need to actually make a choice up front about the particular keywords or scenarios that may be of interest in a particular situation, like Washington on Inauguration Day," said Bailey. "What we do is look at a number of different factors across the firehose of tweets from that area and we factor in geo-proximity of tweets, propagation of patterns and a wide variety of other data."

Bailey was careful not to give away his company's "secret sauce." Dataminr also cannot reveal statistics on the percentage of people who geo-tag their tweets.

Since Dataminr's founding in 2009, the company's primary focus has been on the financial sector — major hedge funds and banks use its technology to detect market-moving information before it makes headlines. It has since expanded into the government and media arenas.

Dataminr was only recently allowed to discuss its involvement with the inauguration, which Bailey said is an unusual but welcome decision.

"It's a great example of Twitter data being used in a practical, real-world use case in a government context and the system obviously working at its best," Bailey said. "I think it's highly rare for government entities to allow things like this to be used as a case study, so we're really excited the Presidential Inauguration Committee green-lighted this and I think it's a very unusual and fascinating story."

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is a leading global media company that informs, inspires and entertains the digital generation. Mashable is redefining storytelling by documenting and shaping the digital revolution in a new voice, new formats and cutting-edge technologies to a uniquely dedicated audience of 42 million monthly unique visitors and 24 million social followers.